Better That Way

Nine days out of high school and I had already run out of things to do with my hands. That’s the part nobody warns you about. Thirteen years of somewhere to be at 7:40 in the morning, and then one Saturday in a rented gown and it’s over, and the only thing left on my calendar was a move-in date in August sitting eleven weeks out like a lit window on the far side of a field. I told my mother I was going to Becca’s. Instead I drove to the Gas-N-Go on Route 9 and parked under the light that buzzed, and I sat there for four full minutes with the engine off before I went in. June bugs kept hitting that light and dropping. The pumps were empty. Through the window: one cashier on a stool with a phone in her hand, and the whole store lit up white and humming like an aquarium. I sat out in the dark working up to a thing I could not have named. Wes Cutler was at the coffee station with his back to me, filling a thermos at almost eleven o’clock at night. The bell over the door went off when I came in. He didn’t turn around. The floor by the coolers was tacky under my shoes and the cashier had a radio going low behind the counter. The whole place smelled like burnt coffee and the pine stuff they mop with. Wes had on the county maintenance shirt with the sleeves cut off clean at the shoulder seams, which leaves a lot of arm and the better part of a back out in the open, and I noticed all of it the way you notice a stair that isn’t where you expected it — all at once, with a small internal lurch. He is tall, and heavy through the shoulders and arms and lean under that, which is what happens when the job is the only workout and nobody designed it. Not built at a gym. Built the way you get built doing the same eleven things forty hours a week since you were fifteen — a back you could read a job history off of. And he did not carry one bit of it like he knew about it. That was the part about him. Boys our age who look like that know, and you can see them knowing. He stood at that coffee station perfectly still, hands quiet, weight even, like a man who had never once considered being looked at. The hands, though. I keep coming back to the hands. They were doing something careful with the lid and they were not careful-looking hands. Big. Knuckles gone rough. Black under the nails that I would find out later does not come out no matter what a person does about it. And a shiny patch on his right forearm the size of a quarter where something at his uncle’s garage had gotten him and won, and I stood there thinking somebody should have looked at that, and then thinking I had no business having an opinion about his forearm at eleven o’clock at night in a gas station. That’s a thing about me. I notice. I have always noticed — what people are wearing on their hands, what they order and whether they change their mind, which parent they check before they answer a question. My mother says it about me like a compliment. My father says it like a job qualification. Neither one of them has ever asked me what it’s like. I knew him the way you know anybody in a town of forty-one hundred. His uncle put the brakes on my Corolla sophomore year. He sat two rows over in American Government and said almost nothing for an entire semester. And once, at a bonfire I hadn’t wanted to be at, he walked me to my car without making it a thing. “You’re drinking coffee at eleven,” I said. He didn’t jump. He capped the thermos and turned around and looked at me with the unhurried attention of somebody who has never once in his life been in a rush to fill a silence. “It’s not for now,” he said. “This place shuts at eleven and I’m on a mower at four.” “Four in the morning.” “Airfield. Before it gets hot and before anybody’s flying.” “That’s a real job?” “Somebody’s got to.” He tipped his head toward the register. “You buying something, or are you just here?” “I’m just here.” It came out of my mouth like a confession and the heat came straight up my throat and into my face, the way it has done to me since I was nine years old and has never once been useful. I did not go places to just be there. I had a laminated four-year plan in a folder at home. I had a full ride to a school six hundred miles away. And I had a father who said my daughter the way he’d say a line item he had been managing successfully for eighteen years. I had my keys in my hand and my thumb was going over and over the fob, and I had no idea how long it had been doing that. I made myself stop. Wes considered me for a second. Then one side of his mouth went up — just the one, and a dimple came in beside it that had no partner on the other cheek — and I remember thinking it was unfair that a face could be built like that and then just be allowed to walk around. “You ever seen a plane land from underneath?” he said.